In recent years, mobile communication services have expanded and increased in popularity around the world. Many operators of modern mobile communication networks offer their users or subscribers advanced data communication services (e.g., for Internet access, or third party email or content access), in addition to standard wireless mobile communication services such as for voice calls or mobile messaging services (e.g., text and/or multimedia).
With the increased sophistication of mobile networks and the increased consumer usage of mobile wireless data services, the recent trend is for the network service providers to replace unlimited data plans with service plans in which the cost to the customer is based on usage, e.g. the amount of data communication transported through the network to/from a mobile device.
In some cases, a customer may enter into an agreement with a service provider and/or a network operator to obtain communication services through a mobile network for a customer's device in exchange for fees based on the amount of the service used. In the case of data transport services, a customer may be billed according to the amount of data sent by and received from the customer's device.
However, in some cases, the data sent to the customer's device and charged to the customer may not have been received by the customer's device for some reason. For example, there may be a delivery failure in the network after the data was recorded for charging to the customer or the customer's device may not be reachable by a mobile communication network. Hence a need exists for reducing the amount that customers are charged for data that they do not actually receive.